Mila looks at him sharply. “But we did. Own up to it. Every one of us was an accessory when we covered it up, because we knew what happened. She did it. And we went along with it because there are no consequences for people like Kennedy or you, and that made it feel like if we didn’t say it, it didn’t happen. But that’s your world, not ours. Chelsea isn’t okay. I’m not okay. You should not be okay with this.”
“I’m not,” he shouts.
I stare at him, taken aback for a moment. Kennedy sits silently, her lips pressed tightly together. She looks like she’s holding in a scream. A long, high-pitched, endless scream. I can hear it in my head, a mourning, keening wail. I need to hear it. I need to know that she cares about what she did. That she mourns Ryan, that every day the knowledge of what she did to him is a howl in her throat begging to be released. That she regrets killing him.
But she says nothing. Nothing.
“Pushing someone into the lake isn’t necessarily intending to kill them,” I say, my voice blending with the hum. “We used to do it all the time. Accidents happen.” I look at Kennedy, her pale, frozen expression. “Did you push him?”
She shakes her head jerkily. “I didn’t mean to. I don’t know. I was startled. Why does it matter? We all know he ended up in the lake. We all tried to pull him out. We tried everything.”
Lies. Always more lies.
“The only thing you tried to do was cover your tracks. You made us believe he ran away. My parents are convinced—I half believed—he’s going to walk through the door any minute. They’re torn in half, believing he’s alive and dead at the same time. It’s destroyed them.”
“It wasn’t malice,” Chase says. “We were trying to protect you.” And right there it hits me. That thing between us. That I haven’t been able to put my finger on. It’s not guilt after all. It’s a lie. And it’s not to protect me.
“You were trying to protect yourselves.” I fill his glass from the decanter. Because I no longer believe that Ryan was killedwith a mere push. In a hit and run, it isn’t the hit that’s the crime. It’s therun. The crucial moment when people—bad, twisted people—choose not to do the right thing. Choose to preserve the convenience of their lives over the hope of saving someone they were supposed to care about. Ryan wasn’t killed by a little shove. He was killed by abandonment. Betrayal. Lies. Because the push wasn’t the end of the story. There was a world of potential paths that branched out from the push. The path where Chase dove in after Ryan right away, and he was saved. The one where Kennedy radioed in for help. The one where Chelsea held me while I cried because there was a terrible accident and we didn’t know what was going to happen, but I wasn’t alone in this. She wasn’t going to let me go through it alone. None of them were going to abandon me to go through this alone. But that’s not what happened. None of it is. And Ryan wasn’t the only victim. All of my friends are equally guilty, because they all watched Ryan die, then looked me in the eye andliedto me. And whatever happened that night, it’s clear that they all made a conscious choice to go all in on it together. All of them vs. Ryan and me. No, I don’t believe I care who did the pushing anymore at all. They’re all guilty as hell.
Chase downs his glass all in one long gulp, and I refill it.
“We were scared,” Mila says. “We didn’t see what happened, we wanted to believe, and yes, we wanted to protect ourselves. There was no time to think. And then Kennedy told us what to say, and it was that or dive headfirst into a nightmare, and we didn’t know. At least, I told myself I didn’t know. But every second that passed, I was more sure that Kennedy pushed Ryan into the water.”
“I didn’t—” Kennedy protests.
“I think you did,” Mila says. “Chase and Kennedy tried to go after him. Even Chelsea tried to swim all the way from the dock.” I wonder if I’ve been too hard on Chelsea. But she played her part too. It’s too late to take any of it back. “I was the one who wanted to take the boat out. I’ve been blaming myself for a year. But there’s nothing we can do about any of it now. That’s the truth. Do what you want with it.”
I fill her glass from the decanter.
She takes it and heads back toward the house. “I need a cigarette.”
Kennedy’s face flushes crimson. No. Blood red. “Chase is the one who hid the body.”
The silence is stunning. Chase turns to her, his lips twitching, stuck between laughing and crying, perfectly cubist. Mila freezes, her bare shoulders tense, like all the world has turned to ice.
“You did.” Kennedy’s voice is steady, but her glass shudders in her hand. “You went back on the lifeboat that night. I saw you.”
“So?” Chase whispers.
“So if you had nothing to hide, why didn’t you tell us?” Tears glisten in Kennedy’s eyes, and I want to smash her into the earth. How dare she cry.
Chase looks at me helplessly, and his silence says everything.
I run after Mila, leaving the others behind. “Is all of that true?”
“Of course it is. My part anyway.”
I try to block the door into the house. “Stay. We can talk some more. It’s not your fault. Accidents do happen. You couldn’t have foreseen any of it. Don’t worry.”
She shakes her head. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Go in a bush.”
Mila looks at me out of the side of her eye. “What are you hiding?”
“Nothing.” I shrug, but it’s unconvincing; I can hear the rising panic in my voice.
I have to let go. They say letting go is hard. That it will come with time. That forgiveness is key. Forgiving the others for surviving, and most of all, forgiving myself. For remaining. But I don’t buy it.